Discussion (47) ¬

I know we haven’t seen any other children of her race, but all the adults can speak English very well with no noticeable difficulties. Granted, I’ve no knowledge of how long they’ve been on land, but it can’t have been much longer than Selkie. At first, I thought she just had an issue with speaking because she wasn’t a human, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. So, why can the other Sarnothi speak with no accent and she cannot?

It’s the difference between formal education and kind of picking things up as you go along, as well as a matter of time and experience. There may also be some developmental issues with the vocal tract, as Selkie is still quite young.

All of the adults we’ve seen so far appear to be skilled professionals of some variety, well out of their student years not only in requisite English courses but in at least one case sufficient medical qualifications to serve as a Doctor at a human hospital.

They all can’t be happy Disney stories, Selkie. A lot of old stories are more cautionary tales, with bad endings meant to scare people onto what their culture believes is the correct path. And if you look at how some of the characters act, sometimes the “happily ever after” ending is a terrible fate.

The Little Mermaid commits suicide and the Sea Witch marries the prince.
Cinderella dies giving birth.
Red Riding Hood gets eaten before the woodsman can save her.
The Beast is killed before Belle falls for him.
Everyone Sleeping Beauty ever knew dies before she wakes up.
King Arthur’s wife leaves him for his best friend, and then he is killed by his illegitimate son (whose mother was Arthur’s sister).
Gurgi dies.

That’s all I can remember off the top of my head that were “Disneyfied”. (I know others were changed, just can’t remember how)

If I remember right Arthur got paranoid about this supposed child of his who would overthrow him/cause his defeat and had all the babies killed … Or something of the like, it’s been an age since I read it.

I’m reading Rosemary Sutcliff’s retelling of The Odyssey and The Iliad to my homeschoolers. Grim grimity grim grim grim. You meet Paris’s big brother Hector, and then you meet his valiant wife and adorable baby son, and then you find out that Hector already knows that due to his little brother being a selfish jackass his city is going to be sacked and burned, his son murdered, and his wife enslaved. And we’re only about a quarter of the way through the book!

DAVE: “Tragic endings are awkward to explain.”
And there are so gosh darn many of them…

Personally, I wager that kids in general (and Selkie in particular) LIKE tragic, gruesome endings a lot more than they say. The Grimm Fairy Tales weren’t remembered for being bright and heartwarming, and Classical Greek Mythology owes its popularity to the ratio of nightmarish monsters and gruesome fates per story.

*sigh* Remember the “good old days”, where every childhood story was a traumatizing, cautionary one?

Your comment reminds me of the scene in Tomie DePaola’s autobiography where he goes to see the Disney Snow White as a little kid, and then stands up on his seat in the movie theater yelling “Where were the red-hot iron shoes?”

I remember getting into a debate in H.S. over the original versions of Cinderella and Three Billy Goats Gruff. We ended up with a half dozen teenagers marching down to the public library after school to look them up. I remembered the bloody versions, I was right. I think that kids don’t generally LIKE gruesome, tragic tales for being tragic and gruesome but more for being FAIR. The bad guy gets punished. The good guy gets rewarded. I’ve known many children who would happily sit through the gore IF the ending is “fair”. If it’s not a “fair” ending then they will complain whether it was a gruesome tale or a fluffy bunny type of story. This is coming from my years of experience as a baby sitter, parent, and professional storyteller.

I’m with you on that, and honestly it still applies to me as an adult. If the story is, basically, fair to the characters, I didn’t and don’t much care how gory or tragic it is.

It’s the fairy tales that are completely random, or seem to do nothing but do horrible things to their protagonist, that are the crappy ones.

Like Urashimatarou—the kid helps a tutle getting brutalized, and for payment he is taken to an undersea kingdom for a feast, then when he goes back home to care for his mother he finds out it’s a hundred years later and everyone he knows is dead—and then he gets turned into a crane for his troubles. The lesson, apparently, being don’t ever help poor, helpless sea turtles in need, because they’re just going to screw up your entire life, and if you DO help them, don’t EVER take them up on it when they offer to do something nice for you in return.

Yeah, that’s a great lesson for kids! Just look the other way when somebody’s geting bullied!

In Grimm tales, only the bad guy dies horribly. Hans Christian Anderson writes the ones where the good guys suffer, but it’s usually bittersweet (Little Mermaid, Steadfast Tin Soldier, Ugly Duckling). This doesn’t fit either pattern to my mind. The moral seems to be, keep your promises or your life will suck. Also, I’m not the biggest fan of this maiden.

The story reminds me a bit of the tale of the ‘Yuki-onna’ from Kwaidan (or that story from ‘Tales from the Darkside: the movie’ if you must :p ). I don’t mean that in a bad way; it also resembles a story told to me when I was little, about a starving violinist and the wolf who benefits him. The fable in this case was a fascinating story and well told. It’s the kind of tough moral that takes time to sink in; maybe even years. I can imagine it to be the sort of thing that will stay in Selkie’s mind for a long long time.

The old tales have such downer endings for a very good reason – people rarely got a happy ending in real life. By being blasted with the worst possible outcome, people were much happier in their lives because no matter how bad they had it, the people in the stories had it worse. And when things turned out well? Genuine joy and surprise.

We ruined ourselves with happy ending stories. We tend to expect things to turn out well in the end, and when we suffer tiny setbacks or are confronted with the injustices in life, we tend to act counterproductively. Mass protests that do little than make ourselves look bad (OWS guys), depression, suicide, litigation over small slights, physical violence over nonsense like “respect”, etc.

Ya, the stories in many cases aren’t fair, but that is the point. We should never expect fairness in life because that is how it works. We are better suited to deal with and fight against injustices when we don’t sit around expecting it to just be like magic. In real life, it’s better to understand that the handsome prince may just prefer to rape the sleeping beauty as opposed to waking her up. Then we aren’t shocked when it happens and can jump to action with better results and more decisively.

As others have mentioned, kids don’t mind gruesomeness if the gruesomeness is in the service of justice and fairness. Regardless of the “moral” of the story being easily grasped, or more abstract that older kids figure out later, bad guys need their heads chopped off by the end of the story or the whole universe is wrong.

This is why the animated version of Axe Cop, a series written by children (started by a boy, but the current arc was imagined by two sisters) requires a “only for mature audiences” warning on Hulu. The typical 11 minute Axe Cop cartoon has a much bigger body count than most full length R rated movies.

So it’s not just that the maiden ended up eaten by the King of All Eels, it’s also that the prince didn’t get decapitated or crushed by boulders or turned into food and eaten, or died of dehydration (difficult but super ironic)…

When I tell my niece a fairy tale, I usually point out all the stupid in them. Goldilocks obviously is an idiot and thief that gets whats coming to her committing a home invasion on bears. Jack is nothing but a worthless thief that got lucky. That kind of stuff. I find children like the sarcasm highlighting the idiocy of some fairy tales.

She made a big mistake. When you’re telling a tale with a gruesome ending, you have to say the ending in the proper context. If you just come out and say it, yeah, it’s a huge shock. But you actually describe the maiden making the choice and getting away to take her choice, then it’s not as shocking. Because the kid sees the reasoning behind it. And the double-moral comes through- not just don’t keep your promises, but also that a horrible marriage to someone you don’t truly love can be worse than death.

“Oh hey so I broke our promise and my husband died and even though you helped me out the first time and I messed up, how about doing me another favor so I can break our promise agan and get some other innocent person killed in order for my own happiness.”

I think there’s a difference between a real apology and sorrow over a mistake, and just trying to weasel your way out of responsibility. Sarnothis in general do not strike me as being the sort of people to do whatever they want and then try to get out of the consequences (although I will admit that we haven’t seen very many of them in depth).
I think that she is more likely to be really sorry. From the look on her face when she first meets him, after someone has seen him, they aren’t likely to feel like brushing him off for a very long time.

Maybe, but if Biggest Eel Ever directly manipulated the prince into killing her husband as punishment (as opposed to it being an automated magical consequence of breaking the contract directly*), he’s definitely the bigger butthole in-between the two of them.

Man, I’m going to go look up which of the local restaurants serve some kind of eel dish, and go eat some just to spite the jerk. “You can put this debt on my tab, Hashy Gin Towel!”

*Like, if BEE hadn’t intervened with his blessing in the first place, was that going to be her fate to begin with, in which case when she broke the contract it wasn’t BEE’s will to punish her like that but rather just what was going to happen if she broke it because magic. In which case BEE is not as much of a butthole, but it’s not clear.

Good point! That seems to be a strong theme in this story. I wonder if the writer created this theme on purpose, or if it was subconscious.
I’m interested to see how he handles this theme; in my experiences, secrets usually lead to suffering and eventually loss.

The problem with the modern rehash of old classic fairytales is, people started padding kids’ worlds and hiding the ugly reality of death away from them. Kids aren’t dummies. They know what death is, usually better than many adults. But now we try to shield them from it, forgetting that we are ALL mortal and death isn’t particular about who gets taken. The old fairytales were stories about the consequences of one’s actions. Sometimes they were even brutal, because guess what? Life is brutal and often unfair. The old fairytales were a way of broaching that to kids so they were prepared to face the world when the time came.

I consider blessed in the fact that, at this point, the only dying things I’ve cradled in my arms are pets and cell phones. It makes me hug my kids often.

As I understand it, the old fairytales weren’t for kids. At all. They were tales told by adults to other adults. Children got to overhear them, sure, but the stories weren’t made for them.

Then along came… the Victorians, I guess, with their notions of progress and superstition, and their idealization of children as perfect little innocents. They’re the ones who thought fairy tales ought to be sweet and pretty, and suitable for children. And ONLY for children. They’re the ones who started calling all folk tales “fairy” tales, when, if you think about it, most of them don’t have a single fairy in sight!